


anodyne

by carlemon



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: M/M, mentions of abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-06
Updated: 2016-11-06
Packaged: 2018-08-29 09:30:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8484196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carlemon/pseuds/carlemon
Summary: Kavinsky and Prokopenko, three seasons together, with nothing but each other.





	

Joseph is— eleven, going on twelve, when he meets Nikolay; he is waifish, small and skinny and savage, he and his father a dichotomy of famine and fury respectively, and Nikolay is tall and lanky in the way of the lazy older kids who smoke down by the pier, crooked shoulders pegged and knotted into his off-brand windbreaker with a dusty Yankees cap slotted at a jaunty angle over his little head and dirt in the high jags of his cheekbones. It's a shitty winter, on the telly for shattering all the old Jersey records, and his nose is a bright red button that Joseph wants to flick and pinch and knock around his mangy face.

He doesn't, only because Joseph's father, Kavinsky Sr. and stain on Kavinsky Jr's youth, has a firm, white-knuckled grip on his shoulder, and his mother is smiling pleasantly, as if neither of them are here and she is braving the bitter cold to have a nice chat with another dowry-bought half-Slav instead of coddle her uncaring husband and her little ghoul-boy of a son. She keeps looking above him, with his wrist in the glossy vice of her nails, to his father, then to Nikolay's mother, who Joseph knows is called Danika Prokopenko, who Joseph knows to have a son and a mother, but not a husband for reasons that elude him at the age of eleven, as if waiting for permission that Joseph's father is apparently unwilling to grant. The Prokopenkos are not Joseph's or his father's company, not Bulgarian or even New Jersey-born, but after the Krastevs were cleared out of the crescent and into a shitty little alley somewhere in Pennsylvania, they have to settle for what they can get, god forbid Joseph and his mother trip into the waiting wanting of the Yanks and the Poles and the Russians, and spill all Kavinsky Sr's secrets and pursuits into the gutter.

An age passes before Joseph's father lets them go, and it is his mother who moves first, surging forward in a swath of cashmere and faux-fur, swallowed into Danika's long, pale, arms and high, girlish, cries— Danika speaks a dialect he doesn't care to decipher despite his exposure to his mother's shrill and unmistakably Bulgarian outbursts, but he manages to place the word _fuck_ , and grins, burning quietly with it underneath the watchful massiveness of his father. Nikolay does not move, but his grandmother does, and it's her who shakes his father's hand, exchanging little Czech-ish pleasantries with her little wrinkled cheeks suffused with a grim disappointment underneath her woolly scarf. Nikolay skips up to her, and calls her  _babička_ , small and keening and sweet, and when his eyes meet Joseph's, he sticks out his tongue and leers.

Joseph leers right the fuck back.

Surprisingly, Nikolay does not shy from it like the kids Joseph knows, not even like the Krastevs' boy, who had three years on him yet ran wild-eyed almost out the window when Joseph pulled from his pocket the three pearl handles of his father's cherished hunting knives and told him where the blood ran from, why it stained. When Joseph stalks up to him, skirting the four-legged stride of their gossiping mothers, Nikolay asks, "Oi, you got television?", and punches Joseph in the shoulder when he answers: "Yeah, but it's _mine_."

Nikolay's fists are large and red in the cold, but it doesn't hurt. Joseph likes him immediately.

* * *

Nikolay is not like Krastev— he can fend for himself, and he loves his mother, and he couldn't care less for Joseph's father or the three pearl knives or the bruises Joseph notches up like war spoils up his ribs after each quiet trip to his father's quieter study. They have nothing to quarrel over like that, and nowhere to play in the winter, and nothing to do but yell out the windows at the fobs that come home late from schools a world and a half away, where you have to work instead of buy your way in. Sometimes, Joseph shows Nikolay magazines he'd snatched off his mother, and sometimes they talk about girls —and, when Nikolay bores of them, boys— at Joseph's old school, before he got kicked out on his ass for bludgeoning a kid unconscious with a thermos, before he got sent up to the principal's office with the white hooks of a smile still cut into his face and the thermos red and blood-oily. Sometimes they bite at each other, and sometimes they howl, but they don't argue, and that's all Joseph's mother needs to bring their little shoulders together and croon that they've become the greatest of friends.

Joseph can't argue with her— he's eleven, and Nikolay is awful and clumsy and everything he'd ever wanted in a friend, his freckled hands warm around Joseph's skinny throat as they wrestle down the stairs, paper skulls and brittle bones bumping on each step. 

(Later, months later, after the Prokopenkos settle into Jersey, when Joseph is twelve but still small and skinny, Nikolay's shit strewn over his bedroom floor and the taste of blood thick in his mouth with every breath his father draws, Danika tells him Nikolay used to play cricket, back in Česko. She says it like she thinks it'll give them something to bond over, like Joseph's the kind of kid to play cricket or baseball or soccer like the kids at his old school— like he doesn't do anything but pore over his mother's mags with his dirty nails and covet filthy secrets and yank at Kolinsky's daughters' skirts hard enough to rip right through the fabric, just to see if they'll go to their father and his father and the silent study— just to see if they'll bicker with a Kavinsky. _No no no no_ — she says it like she's never met a boy his age, like him. All hopeful. Pleading.)

(He gives her a smile he'd pilfered off his father, and takes the cricket bat when she offers it to him.) (His own mother had never smiled so wide at him. He is jealous, in that moment, boyishly envious of Nikolay and his clumsy hands and his grimy freckles and the cricket games he played before Joseph met him.)

* * *

A month later, amidst the suggestions of spring, there's this: Joseph's hands skittering over Nikolay's arm, skinny and pale where Nikolay is stronger, but still spindly. His tongue, sharp as a snake's, keen as his father's, in his little-boy mouth, as he says: "Your mom told me y'used to play cricket. Let's go out. Play a game."

It's a joke, a jeer, and Nikolay recognises it as such with a kind of maturity unbefitting of him, but his eyebrows knit together nonetheless as Joseph drags his nails up his already too-broad shoulder to yank at the collar of his thrift-shop tee. "We got bats," is what he says, "bats, but no balls. Babička didn' pack 'em. We don't have balls." He looks over his shoulder, and he's pouting, and Joseph cackles at it, laughter high with derision and glee. "She said she'd take me out to get some, but she hasn't. _Fuckin_ '— she forgot."

"Balls," crows Joseph, "you forgot your _balls_ , yeah,"

Nikolay laughs, but too loudly, so Joseph hits him up the chin; for a good half hour, they bask in the first whispers of spring like that, Joseph's silver but unbridled tongue hissing words his mother thought foul even as they tumbled from her own chin and down the sink, Nikolay's hands half-joking around his throat, darker than Joseph's bruises and his father's eyes, filthier than Joseph's secrets.

When the sun sets, Joseph says this: "Prokopenko, man. I'll tell you a secret."

* * *

— _That_  is a lie.

He doesn't tell Nikolay anything that day, or the next, or even the day after that.  _Not yet,_ says the wind through the trees when he wakes up to Nikolay's bat, propped up against the door and against the too-small cubby where he'd hidden the blades as a final, babyish  _fuck you_ to Kavinsky Sr.  _Not yet. But soon._

It doesn't matter, because Nikolay doesn't remember, and they go out to the pier and throw chips at the gulls and wave at the little kids and their mothers with the bat, and debate over trashing Joseph's old principal's car for expelling him. In the end, they decide against it — _"fucker did me a favour, yeah,"_ — and run up and down the plateau up the crescent to Joseph's house, across the car park, the skate park; Nikolay is not like Krastev— he's cumbersome and heavy in his own skin, tripping at every given opportunity, so by the time they're home, his knees are red and shredded up and he's lightheaded with laughter as Joseph pushes him through the door, dark eyes bright in their halo of black-eye bruise, something jejune and fearless and free unfurling its white white wings from between his ribs and sweltering pride puffing up his bony chest as he slings his arms around Nikolay's shoulders and laughs and laughs and laughs up the stairs to the tomb-quiet study. 

Nikolay sleeps over that night and when he wakes up, when the dawn is still red through the shutters of his shitty blinds and Joseph's father is still sleeping, Joseph is sitting on the floor, atop the foot of his sleeping bag, hands cupped together and throat parched, fucking _parched_ , thirstythirsty _thirsty_ to show— to impress. He's still groggy, so Joseph leans over, slaps the sleep out of him, slides his fingers up and down the sweet opaline of the three hunting knives, until Nikolay shakes his rancid hair out of his eyes, and then he snaps: "C'mon, princess; you'll get your beauty sleep in later."

Nikolay blinks— "What the _hell_ ," he asks, and then Joseph is clambering over him, twelve years old and _fevered;_ he tells Nikolay "Give me your hands, man, don't be  _gay, don't be gay_ —" and when his hands are in his, when they're knotted and knitted and stitched together, he shows him the secret.

It's a cricket ball, hot as a dying coal in their hands, glowing red as the sun outside. When they turn it over, it reads  _property of J Kavinsky_ across its axis in a delicate, girlish, hand that screams of wisdom and trees, stories and spring. It smells of leaves, and earth, because that's the thing Joseph can't get rid of, no matter how hard he tries. He wonders if he'll have to tell Nikolay that— wonders if he'll even understand. He thinks he'll kill him if he doesn't, or at least kick him out of his room.

Nikolay rolls the ball into his hands. His eyes are what Joseph's mother liked to call _dream-grey_ and _milky_ , all the sleep shocked out of them. Furiously, Joseph wants to touch his cheeks; furiously, he wants to cry out loud what he's done.

He doesn't, and when Nikolay looks up to meet his eyes, his smile is subtle, subdued, but wicked, and Joseph knows that he knows the secret.

He says: "There's more, y'know."

Outside, the wind and the trees whisper to each other.

* * *

Their spring proceeds like so: arms linked together like a couple of girls', long nights spent in sleeping bags in Joseph's room, cricket balls flooding the hardwood floor, Nikolay's long, long, fingers twining lengths of barbed wire around his cherished cricket bat. Joseph dreams of fire, and gunpowder, and the Krastevs' boy hung from his ankles over the pier. The gun that he spawns is odd and chrome and cold in his fingers. Joseph dreams of birds, and fountains, and bright fucking baskets of impossible candy. Gorged full and vulgar, he and Nikolay run laps around the skate park and reality as Nikolay turns thirteen and sleeps it away, Joseph pressing his fingers to his gaunt and freckled cheeks and watching him dream fruitlessly.

"Shit," says Nikolay one spring morning spent wasting away in the skate park, because he's thirteen, because Danika says he's allowed to— but, really, fuck if Joseph'll let him cuss for the both of them. He folds his arms together, nestles into the rail where Nikolay'd fucking _brained_ himself on his board a couple weeks back, and asks, eyebrow cocked, "Yeah?"

"Shit," says Nikolay, again. He's holding the gun, and some firecrackers, and the ball, sleepily unsure of what to focus on. On Joseph's provocation, he chooses the gun; in the chill of the empty park, the chrome finish winks across the half-pipe, slicing into the rail and making Joseph blink. He shivers hot and proud and eager, not tired but aching for sleep. "Shit, K. There's no place for the  _bullets._ " He toys with it to prove his point, but when his thumb makes it onto the trigger, a shock of noise rings through the air: a single gunshot, without target yet undeniably  _real._

Joseph feels the _o_ that his mouth makes; feels rather than hears Nikolay's choked cry of "Holy  _shit!"_ He stops and starts, no longer leaning over the rail, instead arched right off it, and laughs, and laughs, and laughs himself silly as the promise of a fantastical summer runs circles around him.

Their spring ends somewhere in the moment that it takes for Nikolay to cross the space between them and clock him with the gun, in the flare of warmth between them as their fingers brush together and linger like that. Joseph grins around it, and slaps their hands together, and Nikolay barks a Czech-ish joke, but even that does nothing to cool the sudden _hot_ of Joseph's hands, skating long nails up and down Nikolay's sleeve out of not-quite-friendly habit.

The air —and Joseph, _and Joseph—_ burn with dreaming. They go home, and yell lazy Bulgarian obscenities at the girls who dwell too long under the window.

* * *

"Oi, I'll teach you. Make me some wickets."

"— _Sure,_ sweetheart."

* * *

Unsurprisingly for someone who's never seen nor played cricket in his entire coke-driven life, the wickets turn out like shit, crooked, _gummy,_ teasing him to and from sleep. In the end, Joseph wakes up early, and while pacing down the stairs, —careful across the corridor to the study, careful past the bedroom, careful on each step— catches brief snippets of Danika making herself tea and telling Joseph's coked-out mother that her boy's picking up cricket once they move down south because that's where the sun is; where the sport is, supposedly. She calls him  _Proko, Proko, Prokopenko,_ like she would her husband, if she had one, and Joseph— Joseph gallops up the stairs, onto the sleeping bag, and knuckles Nikolay's cheeks until they're bruised raw-tender, gleeful boy-tongue cackling: "Proko, Proko, _Proko_. Prokopenko, _Proko_ —"

* * *

Nikolay is not like Krastev, or Janow, or any of Joseph's old friends and his father's associates' sons: he's cut out of sunshine and grass-stains and dirt-ugly freckles, stifling summer-heat balled into his uneven fists and smoothed into the cheeks of his uneven face as Joseph drags his fingers down his soiled t-shirt, one hand splayed in the general realm of  _Nikolay_ and the other curled around another shitty cricket bat, in perfect form, like he's the kind of kid to play a fucking sport. The sky is as blue as a goddamn miracle and the grass is green and Nikolay's knees are ripped-up red, his presence a late Christmas tree of colour against the slight grassy knoll atop which he stands that makes Joseph want to put his head to the grass and dream and dream forever.

"Oi, twelvie," calls Nikolay, and Joseph sneers in the way that he knows is striking against the bruised, pummelled, flesh of his right cheek— the purple ringing his right eye. It still stings when he cares to think about it, but when he reaches into the tote bag at his feet and palms the cold of the chrome gun up against him, he thinks he can let it slide.

"K, man! Twelvie," shouts Nikolay, again, and Joseph thinks of Kavinsky Sr. and lets the gun slide into its place, jagged smile not even half as scorched as the rose-red blooming over his exposed shoulders. The air is thick in his throat, a cicada-summer reminding him of what boyhood is supposed to be, and it crashes over Joseph in white-hot waves that he feels like a child, and not like dreams, and not like gunpowder, and not like his father.

A beetle crawls up his thigh, and he answers, leering: "Yeah,  _Proko_ ," — and, _ha,_  there is nothing as bright or as awful as the half-pissy, half-humoured, surprise that scours out the crevices of Nikolay's ugly face, shaping him at once whetted and joyous as he laughs, "Whatever, K,", grin filled with teeth and a barely teenage earnestness.

It comes to him gently in the rustle of far-off trees that there's been nothing as brilliant as this here and now. He thinks— there's never been a summer where the heat's been  _more_ than this, and he's unsure and stumbling over his skinny legs but getting up anyways, keen for Nikolay's solid, sweaty, grip and for the sun in his eyes and in his lungs.

He hopes to god Nikolay can play a good game of cricket, and joins him on the knoll where the bustle of Jersey becomes a distant memory.

**Author's Note:**

> oh man, you have no idea how hard it was to resist dropping their first names and just write them as normal. oh, man. fuck that noise. jiang was gonna be in this so i could show off my hc name for him, but then i realised he'd be like eight as per my headcanons and i jus.
> 
> anyways, if you like proko and him as cody saintgnue... hmu :)
> 
> but yeah, my orig. headcanon was that k and proko were childhood friends, who eventually recruited jiang as a unit, and then, some time later, skov, somehow. idk what you gotta do to get a jock kid on your side. swan came last.


End file.
